Thoughts from a police cell

We spend so much time dwelling on the past, and yet we (I must stop speaking for others and say “I”) make so little effort in projecting what we (I) have learned into the future, in order to predict outcomes.

I was thinking about me and Alan. Could we have projected into the future when we were playing round the lamppost with May James and Dorothy Webster? Could we have predicted that Alan would kill himself on a motorbike at such an early age, and that I would go on? I have already lived 3 Alan lifetimes! (I’m not complaining, mind – I want to go on!)

But can I project now? For the next 10 years? For the next 5 years? I have difficulty in projecting as far as the weekend.

Yet surely it would be in my interests to at least make an effort, and to ‘learn from my mistakes’.

I find it all so depressing. And depression saps my strength, the energy I need to “project”, and so it goes on. The problem is how to break the cycle: an intervention from outside? A lucky accident maybe?

We are driven by the selfish gene to procreate, and therefore assure its continuance. But why? Why does the selfish gene bother? If we are at the mercy of this gene, who is the selfish gene at the mercy of? [Yes, I have ended a sentence with a preposition – bad syntax, but who cares].

I watch ants scurrying about, and I want to say to them: take it easy lads, don’t knock yourself out – it aint worth it. But they wouldn’t listen.

Is it really all an accident? The whole process set in motion by a random collision in space: a Big Bang? But then we ask: where did the colliding bodies come from? The gasses? Space itself? And it is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, and seeing the back of your head.

In our world – the world of the five senses – we have beginnings and endings. Perhaps the most ‘obvious’ example being birth and death: a baby is born, grows up and eventually dies. That is straightforward enough. But is it? Beginning? When does a person ‘begin’? At physical birth? At conception? Or must we go further back? Did that human life really begin with me having five whiskies and you four Bacardi Breezers? Or further back still - when our eyes met, over the photocopier?

Ah, but you say, we can distinguish between biological and psychological beginnings. But can we? Do we not arbitrarily construct beginnings and endings so as to parcel up our lives into manageable chunks? And make some sense of our world? We like to ‘draw a line’ under things, “effect closure”, “move on”. If only it were that easy. But real life is not like that. Real life is messy, full of ‘loose’ ends. What is that expression “we all come with baggage”? I come with so much baggage I need a team of porters.

But there may be some good news in all of this. If we can find psychological or metaphysical antecedents to our biological beginning (see above), might not there be sequential endings? So that if I say, I am going to end it all, I may be in for a surprise: I might end “it” – my biological life, but not “all” because there could be as many endings as there were beginnings. And it follows, therefore, that there must be as many beginnings as there are endings, the process continuing as far into the future as it reaches back into the past.
(I have always had a sneaking suspicion that if I decided to end “me” I would not be let off the hook - I would have to be someone else. Of course this does not make sense, but it is what I feel – sometimes.)

Of course, past and future are illusions: very necessary illusions, to enable us to live our life on this planet. But it is as well to bear in mind that that is all they are: illusions.

The human mind cannot conceive of an event having no beginning – but that is a limitation of the human mind, rather than an “impossibility”. So we have a mystery. Better to live with the mystery – and keep working at it - than invent a mythology to “explain” it.


Apropos ending a sentence with a preposition: Winston Churchill had a draft of one of his speeches returned to him by a parliamentary aide, respectfully pointing out that he had ended a sentence with a preposition. Winston sent it back with a scribbled note: This is the kind of bureaucratic interference up with which I will not put.